Waiting on Whispers
by Methuselah Honeysuckle
Summary: After entering the latest of Doug Rattman's dens, Chell sits and waits for her artist to return.
1. Ghosts and Portals

He was all that she had.

He may have been insane, but to her, that was beautiful. His paintings told of a tortured mind, a tarnished, guilty soul. He was the epitome of destructive emotions, the definition of torture.

Somewhere in that pool of madness, she found a kindred spirit.

Maybe she related to him because she was living in a form of torture herself.

She had found splashes of his murals speckled throughout a good number of the previous test chambers. Her fingers had brushed across the rough, colored cement and metal as if comforting a friend. Comfort was something that they both desired. She couldn't give, and she couldn't take, so she did what she could, even if it was symbolic.

In all likelihood, he was dead. Still, sometimes she heard nonsense through his walls, and she was filled with a burst of hope.

The voices were painful and frightening to listen to, but she cherished them.

Perhaps if she had stayed in the painted tombs, if she hadn't quickly moved on, she would have found him.

But, then again, maybe not.

Maybe the voice was his ghost.

No matter how silly the idea, confronting something so untouchable, so unfixable, terrified her.

She couldn't defeat something that was undefeatable.

She couldn't be saved by something that was unsaveable.

And, she couldn't be brought back to life by something that didn't even have one.

So she observed the whispering walls, and then she left them behind her _(but she never forgot)_.

His words had followed her from the very beginning. At first, she had disreguarded them as ramblings of a test subject gone mad, one that had gone through the test chambers before she had and couldn't handle the stress. But then, near the end, she saw the words for what they really were - help. He was trying to help her.

He cared for her.

Of course, her deprived mind failed to realize that the words could have potentially been left for another test subject days or weeks or even years before.

She realized that now, but it didn't matter, because after waking up and finding a mural of herself, she knew what had been assumed previously was the truth.

And now, in ever growing amounts, she craved his company. She craved his madness, his companionship, because she had gone slightly mad herself.

Chell sat, huddled, on top of an air vent in a circular room, staring at another piece of him. She bit down her fear and listened to the voice.

She would wait for the voice to stop, and then, when it did, she would wait for him to return.

He had to - because now, his words wouldn't help her.

She needed _him. _


	2. False Voices and Lost Thoughts

_Forgive the sappiness of this chapter - actually, forgive the sappiness of this whole story so far. I'm trying to stray away from writing ridiculous lulzy fanfics all the time - this is a product of that attempt.  
>The next chapter will be sweet, but it won't be quite as sappy as these first two chapters. The Rattmann and Chell relationship in this story will be purely platonic unless you want me to keep writing past three chapters. If people are interested in that, I will turn this story into a slow-moving romance. <em>

_ Please give me your thoughts!  
>-Kirsten<br>_

* * *

><p><em>'You're being too hard on yourself... Maybe you need to calm down.'<em>

Cube was right, but that didn't make his situation any harder to bear. Doug clutched a fist to his eye, rubbing away the tears, and then slammed it against the wall. He slumped his head in between his legs.

"It doesn't... It doesn't... There's too many deaths on my head - they're all so angry at me," He let out a choking sob, shuddering, "And the have a right to be. Why do you think they haven't killed me yet?"

Cube was silent for a moment, and the tension increased tenfold in his shoulders.

_'please speak'_

Cube's voice made itself known in a whisper, _'Maybe they don't think that you deserve to die.'_

Doug looked up at Cube, eyes red and puffy from salty tears, "I do deserve to die. Sacrifices have stained blood into my hands for so many years since that fateful day, and now... Today can't be any different. She's still... because of _me_..."

_'You can't change the past.'_

"You can't erase the past."

_'You can change the future - and now, you are doing your best to make amends.'_

Doug lapsed into silence. He looked out at the wreckage spread out before him and leaned an elbow on a knee, curling rough fingers in graying hair. He sat in silence with Cube for a few minutes.

Then, he turned back to his friend, amusement by irony showing on his face, "These were the left-wing offices - one of the only places that her cameras never reached," He laughed, "Look at them now - she reached them. Look what her destruction has done."

_'Hey, well, to be fair... Technically this is Chell's destruction.'_

But, Doug didn't think too hard on Cube's comment. He instead looked at the ruins distantly, a reminiscent smile on his lips, "Yeah, alright..." He turned to Cube, "Do you remember Susan? She brought me a dried out doughnut every Tuesday when she passed rounds through our sector of Aperture... She didn't know I was psychotic of course. It's a good thing she didn't figure that out before she died, right?"

Cube snorted, ignoring the more depressing, self-hating parts of Doug's statement,_ 'You expect me to remember that? Have you gone even more insane? I didn't even know you then.'_

"Of course you did," Dough hissed, "You're just a figment of my imagination, aren't you? You've always known me."

Cube quieted for a second, and then let out a hurt response,_ '...Don't speak nonsense.'_

With a deep, tired breath, Doug leaned back, relaxing his arms to his sides and looking up at the ceiling. Up above was the room he had spent weeks in. Half of the things he did in there he couldn't remember - in fact, half of the things he did now-a-days were tossed away by his memory.

It was probably for the best he supposed.

He continued to stare at the ceiling above him, the hum of the fan a few steps and a reach away buzzing away in the background. Images began blurring through his head, and then everything became a dream, and it was hard to focus but at the same time, everything seemed so _clear. _

His last thought was that he could see again, and then he lived only in experience and remembered nothing.

When he reawakened from this state, he realised that his position had changed. He was standing up against the wall beneath the fan, and Cube was screaming at him from across the room in the corner where he had last left him.

_'It's her it's Chell! She's there, above you! She's in the fan, she's in the den! Looklooklooklooklook!"_

Doug looked up blearily at the spinning machinery above him. He saw the bottoms of her legs and the orange color of the legs of her jumpsuit.

He nearly collapsed.


End file.
